Road Safety Bill [Lords] - Standing Committee A

[Sir Nicholas Winterton in the Chair]

Road Safety Bill [Lords]

Nicholas Winterton: I shall deal at the beginning with one or two domestic matters. In doing so, I welcome all hon. Members to the Committee. I am confident that the Bill will be debated constructively and positively.
I hope that the programme motion will be noted by all Members. I remind the Committee that there is a money resolution and a Ways and Means resolution in connection with the Bill, and that copies of both are available in the room. I also remind Members that adequate notice of amendments should be given and that as a general rule, my co-Chairman Janet Anderson and I do not intend to call starred amendments. Will all Members also ensure that electronic gadgets—pagers and mobile telephones—are either turned off or on silent mode during sittings? I am inclined to react aggressively if I hear any tinkle or other electronic sound.
We come first to the programme motion, debate on which may last up to half an hour. Members will be aware that the matter was discussed by the Programming Sub-Committee last evening.

Stephen Ladyman: I beg to move,
That—
(1) during proceedings on the Road Safety Bill the Standing Committee shall (in addition to its first meeting at 10.30 a.m. on Tuesday 21st March) meet—
(a) at 4.30 p.m. on Tuesday 21st March;
(b) at 9.00 a.m. and 1.00 p.m. on Thursday 23rd March;
(c) at 10.30 a.m. and 4.30 p.m. on Tuesday 28th March;
(d) at 4.30 p.m. on Tuesday 18th April;
(e) at 9.00 a.m. and 1.00 p.m. on Thursday 20th April;
(2) the proceedings shall be taken in the following order: Clauses 1 to 4; Clauses 17 to 19; Clause 5; Schedule 1; Clauses 6 to 9; Schedule 2; Clause 10; Schedule 3; Clauses 11 to 16; Clauses 20 to 22; Schedule 4; Clauses 23 to 40; Schedule 5; Clauses 41 to 60; Schedule 6; Clauses 61 to 64; new Clauses; new Schedules; remaining proceedings on the Bill;
(3) the proceedings shall (so far as not previously concluded) be brought to a conclusion at 4.00 p.m. on Thursday 20th April.
I welcome you to the Chair, Sir Nicholas. It is a pleasure to serve under you, and I have no doubt that it will be a very enjoyable experience for all of us.
Yesterday I was being driven along the M6 between two visits in the west midlands when, a few hundred yards ahead of me, a large lorry travelling in the opposite direction veered across the carriageway and smashed into the safety barrier, sending barrier and wreckage flying across the road in front of the vehicle in which I was travelling. Fortunately, the driver whom I was with was sufficiently skilful to avoid the debris, otherwise I think that the Committee would have been looking for another Minister before the  sitting could have commenced. The experience has reminded me to ensure that the Whips look after me better in future, as I have a majority of only 660, and I do not think that they would welcome a by-election at the moment. It has also given me renewed enthusiasm for the Bill, so I look forward to the debate. I am pleased to see the expert Committee that has been put together, including many hon. Members on both sides of the room who have had a long and meritorious association with road safety issues over many years.
The programme motion allows us nine sittings. The proposed order of consideration is logical, and nine sittings should be more than adequate if we are all disciplined about making our contributions, which I have no doubt we will be. The clauses will mostly be considered in the order in which they appear in the Bill, although the order of the first group that we will discuss has been changed slightly to allow us to discuss speeding issues at one time rather than have to return to them later. I am confident that the programme motion will be received well by the Committee.

Nicholas Winterton: Before I call the spokesman for Her Majesty’s Opposition to respond, may I say, I am sure on behalf of the Committee, that we are delighted that the Minister came safely through his scrape on the M6? Coming down the M1, there were signs all the way saying that there was a problem on the M6. We are delighted that he came through unscathed owing to the skill and expertise of his ministerial driver.

Owen Paterson: Thank you, Sir Nicholas. Serving under your chairmanship is a great pleasure. The Opposition will do our best to follow your instructions and to stay firmly in line, as I know that you will come down heavily on those who transgress. It is also a great pleasure to see the Minister here after his unpleasant experience yesterday, which shows the relevance to millions of people of our discussions over the next few weeks.
We have avoided a by-election, and I am glad that we have a Minister sitting in front of us who looks not only safe and sound, but ready to answer a number of questions, as the Opposition have tabled a large number of amendments. I would like first to welcome our team. My hon. Friend the Member for Wimbledon (Stephen Hammond) has been an enormous help in drafting our amendments, of which I think that there are more than 100. Our Whip, my hon. Friend the Member for North-West Norfolk (Mr. Bellingham), will obviously provide valuable input from the rural point of view, as I suppose I will. It is also a great pleasure that my right hon. Friend the Member for East Yorkshire (Mr. Knight) is present, as he is a fund of knowledge on motoring and motor cars; I believe that he owns more cars than any other individual Member of Parliament. He told me once in the Tea Room that he was up to 15 cars—is that right?
Mr. Greg Knight (East Yorkshire) (Con) indicated assent.

Henry Bellingham: They are all in the House of Commons car park.

Owen Paterson: I hope that they are not all in the House of Commons car park—my right hon. Friend might assure us of that later. He has a great knowledge of this field, and as a former Minister, he knows how the world of power works. We look forward to hearing his advice. It is also with great pleasure that I greet my hon. Friend the Member for Ilford, North (Mr. Scott), who will give the suburban or urban perspective.
We have tabled a large number of amendments, some of them obviously probing. We would like the Government to clarify the clauses, and we would like to tease out what they are really about. We will make it clear when amendments are probing amendments and when we are merely seeking information and clarification. Most of the amendments that we will consider today will probably fall into that category, as we do not have any great disagreement on the first few clauses. Indeed, there are parts of the Bill that we support. We are quite open about that, as we were on Second Reading, which we did not oppose.
Our general drift, however—I made this point in my winding-up speech on Second Reading—is that one cannot coerce 34 million people with driving licences. That is just too many people; they drive 25 million cars and 2.5 million vans. Things must be done in partnership, and they cannot all be stick. There has to be some carrot, and recognition of what is happening on our roads. We cannot legislate in an ivory tower in Parliament, ignoring the reality—

Nicholas Winterton: Order. I am sure that I am going to hear this speech later on, because it has nothing directly to do with the programme motion. I hope that the hon. Gentleman will use his eloquence when we are dealing with the appropriate amendments, but we are currently debating the programme motion.

Owen Paterson: I am sorry, Sir Nicholas. I am happy to be picked up.
We will support certain provisions, and some of our amendments will be probing. We will withdraw such amendments happily, but there are other amendments on which we really want the Government to change. My hon. Friend the Member for South-West Bedfordshire (Andrew Selous) has raised concerns, for example, and he has had a satisfactory meeting with the Minister, so we will happily withdraw the relevant amendment if the Government promise to come up with a serious amendment of their own, drafted by Ministry officials. Then there are bound to be other amendments on which we simply do not agree and on which we will stick to our guns, because there are certain areas where the Bill is not perfectly drafted and is flawed in some of its conceptions.
With those remarks, as the debate is open-ended and no guillotine is built into the motion, as we agreed in our informal meeting last night, I can say that we will be happy to support the motion as it stands.

Alistair Carmichael: I associate myself with the remarks of the Minister and of the hon. Member for North Shropshire (Mr. Paterson) in welcoming you to the Chair, Sir Nicholas.
This is the first occasion in which I have had any dealings with a transport Bill since my appointment by my party’s new leader. Having previously dealt with home affairs, however, I am no stranger to the Standing Committee system and to this Corridor. Being back in the salt mines at such an early stage in a new era of responsibility is an unexpected pleasure for me. I am delighted that the Minister is here, given the perils that he has clearly endured to be with us.
The hon. Member for North Shropshire said that he offered from the Conservative Benches the perspective of the urban, suburban and rural. I can add to that, because I bring the island perspective, which is a distinctive perspective. It was observed after I had been appointed to the Committee that I represented a constituency that contained not a single yard of motorway or railway track. I therefore hope that I can bring dispassionate and disinterested observation to our consideration of the Bill.
I am delighted that, for once, I am not the only Scot in this Standing Committee, as many parts of the Bill will have a significant impact in Scotland. I see the hon. Members for Cumbernauld, Kilsyth and Kirkintilloch, East (Rosemary McKenna), for Ayr, Carrick and Cumnock (Sandra Osborne), for Glasgow, South (Mr. Harris), previously Glasgow, Cathcart, and for Motherwell and Wishaw (Mr. Roy).
The Government’s provision of nine Committee sittings should, with good will, be sufficient to deal adequately with the Bill. I believe that the serious work is done in Committee and that more often than not, less is more.

Greg Knight: I add my voice, Sir Nicholas, to those that have already expressed delight that you will chair at least some of our sittings.
I am pleased that the Minister escaped unscathed from his recent experience on the M6, which I believe is one of the most dangerous motorways in the United Kingdom, mainly because of the volume of traffic. I hope that when he has a chance and it is in order for him to do so, he will tell us whether the crash barrier in question was the old type or the new concrete type that appears to be being introduced on some of our motorways. There is an aspect of his incident that he should perhaps look into. Far too many accidents on motorways are caused by heavy goods vehicle drivers driving carelessly, sometimes while on the telephone, and using the size of their vehicle to throw their weight around. I hope that his Department will look at the percentage of accidents caused by HGV drivers and see whether something can be done about it.
I am less happy than my hon. Friend the Member for North Shropshire that a programme motion has been tabled. I am delighted that the Minister has thought it appropriate not to have internal knives. Where there is a guillotine motion, it should always be for members of the Committee to decide what aspects  of the measure they want to dwell on and not for the usual channels, which are not part of the Committee, to tell us that we must finish so many clauses by a certain date. But why is there a guillotine motion at all? The measure was not opposed by any party on Second Reading. There was no obstruction and no attempt to say to the House that we did not wish to see the measure as a vehicle—if hon. Members will forgive the use of the word—to look at road safety issues. The parties agreed that there should be a Road Safety Bill. The differences on Second Reading arose in relation to the items that the different parties wanted to see in the Bill or removed from it.
I am therefore disappointed that the Minister has not taken the view taken by the last Conservative Government, who thought that there should never be a programme motion unless and until there was evidence of obstruction. That used to be the basis on which we proceeded in Standing Committee: a guillotine was never imposed until it was clear that the Opposition were seeking to prevent passage of the measure. I may be a lone voice in this regard, but I deplore the fact that we have this programme motion before us. It is not as bad as it might have been, but I still deplore the fact that we have it at all.
The last time that I whipped a Bill in Standing Committee, I was the then Government’s Home Office Whip and I had a perfectly good relationship with the Labour Home Office spokesman. [Interruption.] I will come to who it was. Throughout the proceedings of that Bill that spokesman said where he wanted the set-piece debates and the time of day that he wanted them, and that if we helped him to achieve that we could have the out-date of the Bill whenever we wanted. That spokesman was the Prime Minister. We never had any problems with the Prime Minister when he was an Opposition spokesman. I do not think that the Minister will have any problems with my hon. Friend, because the Opposition start the examination of this Bill from a position of good will. We want the vehicle of this Bill, it is just its contents that we wish to scrutinise and examine.

Stephen Ladyman: May I point out to the right hon. Gentleman that the current Home Affairs spokesman for the Opposition said on Radio 4 that part of this Bill was a matter of philosophical difference between us and that the Conservatives would oppose it at all costs. I think that he has changed his position on that now, but nevertheless he said in public that the Opposition would try to hold this Bill up if they could. I welcome the fact that they are now taking a far more constructive line on I, but there is potential for fundamental disagreement.

Greg Knight: I am not sure that the Minister is right; opposition is not necessarily obstruction. The Minister needs to distinguish between the two, because I am sure that he would accept, on reflection, that effective scrutiny and seeking to persuade by rational argument  and reasonable discussion that a particular clause should not be in a Bill are not of themselves obstruction. It is what we are here for.

Nicholas Winterton: The House decided, rightly or wrongly, that there should be a programme motion, and we must accept that basis, whether Opposition Members like it or not. The question is whether the programme motion will allow adequate scope for appropriate debate on those parts of the Bill that Opposition Members do not like, rather than whether they agree with the principle of programming. I hope that the right hon. Gentleman will bear that in mind.

Greg Knight: I will certainly bear that in mind, Sir Nicholas. In essence I am saying that I do not like the principle of programming and so I do not like this programme motion.

Owen Paterson: May I reassure my right hon. Friend that we made it quite clear that there are elements of the Bill that we do not like but there are also elements on which we disagree in principle? We will have some long debates. We have not opposed the programme motion because it is open-ended. We had an assurance from the Minister last night that we could go on into the night if necessary. I am relaxed that we will have plenty of time to discuss issues where we disagree. As I made quite clear, there are issues of fundamental difference between us and the Government. I reassure my right hon. Friend that we will discuss them at great length if necessary.

Greg Knight: If we go through the night often, we will all be relaxed. I am not relaxed about the principle and therefore I do not like to see these things on the Order Paper. That is the point that I am placing on record.

Question put and agreed to.

Clause 1 - Road safety grants

Owen Paterson: I beg to move amendment No. 15, in page 1, line 13, at end add—
‘()Before making a grant under this section to any body which is not a local authority, the relevant national transport authority shall consult the relevant local transport authority or authorities.’.

Nicholas Winterton: With this it will be convenient to discuss the following amendments:
No. 16, in page 1, line 13, at end add—
‘()No road safety grant shall be paid to any organisation which comprises or is part of a safety camera partnership.’.
No. 17, in page 1, line 13, at end add—
‘()A national transport authority shall publish an annual report including information on—
()the number of grants given,
()the purposes for which those grants were given,
()the effectiveness of the grants in promoting road safety, and
()such other aspects as the national transport authority may consider appropriate.’.

Owen Paterson: We get off to fairly easy bowling in this clause. We do not disagree hugely with it and we have tabled three amendments of a probing  nature.The clause says that payments will be made by a national transport authority to local authorities for the purposes of promoting road safety. The Opposition would like to know what will happen to the funds that are allocated by central Government to local government agencies for road safety. We have received representations from a number of groups that are alarmed because local authorities, knowing that fresh funds will come in through the conduit provided by the clause, might be given the chance to cut their road safety budgets. It would be helpful if the Minister said what sums are going to local authorities, how they are distributed at the moment and under what conditions, and how he envisages the new funds being disbursed. How will the process be decided and audited?
Through amendment No. 15 we are seeking to examine whether it is possible for the funds to be spent beyond the bounds of local authorities. Could they be disbursed to smaller agencies—such as parish councils and town councils—with the approval of the local authority, which is probably in charge of speed limits at county level, and has an overall county view on them? We should like to know how the funds will be distributed and what consultation there will be between the local transport authority and the relevant national authorities.
On amendment No. 16, we are aware that some authorities will be part of safety camera partnerships, because there are local authorities that comprise constituent parts of such partnerships. The amendment is quite deliberate, however, because we should really like to see localism on the issue. We think that there is merit in schools having ability to access funds for local speed limits. Some interesting work has been done in Canada, where there are quite tight speed limits around schools at certain times of day, and that is widely known and displayed in notices that are rather like the parking restriction notices that we see in our cities. The notices indicate at what time of day one is not allowed to go above a certain speed near a school.
I believe that there is merit in localism for the issue of road safety. When I drive from my home to Oswestry I go past a primary school where there is a very narrow road and a narrow pavement. The statutory limit of 30 mph is wrong in that location, because when cars are parked up—with little parking space—it is not sensible to go at that speed. It is well worth investigating the idea that such schools should discuss with the local authority—as proposed in amendment No. 15—the merits of a localised limit.
There are numerous parish councils in my constituency and I am sure that my hon. Friends from suburban and urban seats could speak for town councils. The same idea could apply to those councils. There are areas where local people have strong feelings about the issue, and relatively small sums can make a big difference.
The obvious vehicle for such a measure is an automatic sign. In fact, on my way to a meeting in Portcullis House this morning, I was clocked by one in the passageway between Speaker’s Court and New  Palace Yard. It got me doing 5 mph—walking. The big red sign displaying the number five brought me up. We all have these signs in our constituencies. This is anecdotal, but numerous people have told me that flashing signs that tell the exact speed do have an impact on people’s driving behaviour. I have heard it too often for it not to be true. Surely it would be meritorious to have a serious look at allowing parish councils or town councils to apply for funding for such modest schemes. Perhaps the Minister will tell us how much self-illuminating signs cost and his opinion of them.
Amendment No. 16 clearly suggests that we would like to go beyond local authorities. We are nervous that local authorities will be able to grab the money and allocate funds that were previously dedicated to transport issues and road safety to another pot. I would like the Minister’s reassurance on that matter.
I like the idea of localism. When the sentiments behind amendments Nos. 15 and. 16 were debated last summer—my right hon. Friend the member for East Yorkshire will confirm this—then Minister, Mr Jamieson, claimed that they were incompatible. That is not the case; this is deliberate.
I would really like some localism and local decision making. Such an approach would also have an impact on local opinion. If people felt that there was funding available for tiny schemes, such as putting some signs around a school or erecting a self-illuminating sign, it would be beneficial.
I would also like to move amendment No. 17, partly picked up in Brake’s submission on the proposed amendments. That organisation called for an annual report—

Nicholas Winterton: May I correct the hon. Gentleman? He cannot yet move amendment No. 17; he may merely discuss it.

Owen Paterson: Thank you, Sir Nicholas. I will discuss amendment No. 17 in the light of Brake’s submission, which called for an annual report on the speed limits on roads. We thought that the legislation should go further than that, and that it is appropriate to have an annual report on where the money is going, how many grants have been given out, the purposes of those grants, and, above all, their effectiveness in promoting road safety. It is important that the term “road safety” is included, because clause 1 would be improved dramatically if it were stated clearly that we want to know how the grants are spent and what impact they have on road safety.
For instance, returning to my two examples, if it were decided to put speed limits around schools, it would be very interesting to receive an annual country-wide analysis on what that had done, whether it was sensible and whether the following year it might be better to pursue entirely different expenditure. Again, modest schemes, such as painting the road, having different signs and reducing the number of signs and not muddling motorists can have impact. It would be interesting and worth while to know how the money was disbursed, to whom it was disbursed, and what impact it had had.
As a catch-all, amendment No. 17 concludes with a blanket statement, recommending that a national transport authority could discuss any other aspects that it thought appropriate.
Clause 1 is benign. We do not intend to oppose it; we just want to tease out what it is really about. It would be improved if the Minister looked favourably on our amendments, because there is real value in localism and in seeing the money spent locally.

Alistair Carmichael: I do not need to detain the Committee at any great length. The hon. Member for North Shropshire said that the clause is benign, which is a view that I share. Its objectives are well intentioned and would be of significant benefit. There is merit in some of the thoughts that the hon. Gentleman floats in his amendments, especially the requirement for consultation in amendment No. 15. Although I am no great lover of annual reports—barely a day seems to pass when half a dozen do not end up in my bin—it would be appropriate for there to be a proper mechanism whereby we could keep track of the impact of clause 1. I would have preferred the report to be to Parliament, because too often we labour away in Committee, the Bill is enacted and that is the last we hear of the proposals, often because the Government do not implement them. I hope that this measure will be implemented, because it can make a significant difference.
The hon. Member for North Shropshire was right to say that localism is important. Communities should feel that they have a meaningful say on road safety measures—that they are not just visited on them from on high. It is much more likely that there will be proper obedience to road safety measures if communities have some sense of ownership of them.
I did not follow the hon. Gentleman’s thinking when he said that the exclusion of any organisation that comprises, or is part of, a safety camera partnership would necessarily lead to a greater degree of localism, but that may emerge from the debate.

Owen Paterson: My point is that we want to get over the normal local authority organisations and go right down to local level. The county might be part of the safety camera partnership but we want to go beyond that to the school or the parish council. The amendment was deliberately intended to probe the Minister on how the money would get through.

Alistair Carmichael: I accept that the amendment is probing and that the motivation behind it is good and sound, but I have reservations about whether it provides the most effective means to achieve what is intended.

Greg Knight: One thing that unites hon. Members on both sides of the Committee is that we all want road safety to be improved, although we may disagree on  how to achieve it. One way of doing so is to ensure that every driver who transgresses receives penalty points on his licence and eventually is removed from the road.
I believe that a one-eyed approach is less effective than a broader approach that encompasses educating all road users, not just those who drive a motor vehicle but cyclists and pedestrians, and increasing warnings. My hon. Friend the Member for North Shropshire mentioned the flashing electronic signs, which are very effective because they warn all road users who may not be familiar with a stretch of road that they need to take care. I hope when the Minister replies he will confirm that he will take a broad view of road safety and consider a mixture of penalties, education and warnings where appropriate. Some Opposition Members feel that the so-called road safety camera partnerships in some parts of the country are obsessed with raking in fine money by catching motorists speeding and less focused on the wider promotion of road safety.
The clause is very widely drafted, which may be a reason to applaud the Minister. Subsection (1) states:
“A national transport authority may make payments to any local authority or any other authority or body for meeting the whole or part of the capital or running costs of any measures”.
If “any measures” are indeed to be considered—if the issue is to be considered in the broad sense—there is a case for encouraging local innovation. If a parish council has a unique idea about how road safety can best be promoted in the village or villages it represents, why not encourage that and give it a grant? The measure does not have to be yet another red box alongside the road; it may be a scheme to go into schools to teach children about the dangers of traffic, or a method of encouraging members of the community to play their part, as they do in neighbourhood watch schemes which have been such a success in tackling burglary. There may be many such ideas that the Government have not yet picked up on but that should be encouraged. I therefore hope that the Minister will confirm that he envisages the clause operating as broadly as possible.
I agree with the comments on amendment No. 17. In general we do not want to encourage more bureaucracy, but the Minister will satisfy us if he can say how he envisages the effectiveness of the clause being monitored. Does he expect his Department to do that and feed back to him? I would be satisfied if there is to be active monitoring by officials at the Department for Transport: I do not necessarily want the over-regulation of an annual report. If that is how the Minister envisages the clause working, perhaps he will undertake periodically to make a written statement to the House stating what grants have been given, what new ideas have been encouraged and so on. I think that the Minister will be able to allay many of our concerns when he responds to the debate.

Tom Harris: On a point of order, Sir Nicholas. Will you give members of the Committee permission to remove their jackets?

Nicholas Winterton: I am extremely traditional but I am prepared to move with the times. If members of the Committee wish to remove their jackets in order to be more comfortable, I am happy that they should do so. I hope that that is a satisfactory response to a matter of comfort, rather than a point of order.

Lee Scott: I rise to speak to amendment No. 15. As chairman of the governors of a local school, I shall talk about some of the problems experienced in suburban areas where traffic congestion and parking causes immense problems for children on their way to school. Anything that can help in that respect—for example, signs that flash up the speed that cars are doing—is to be welcomed. Many of those signs have been put up in my constituency, but local authorities have limited resources and anything that can bring extra money for such purposes is to be encouraged. I therefore support my hon. Friend’s proposal.
In the average suburban area, single-line traffic and cars parked either side of the road cause enormous problems. The proposal will help to solve them and save lives in the long term.

Stephen Ladyman: I ask you to indulge me for a moment, Sir Nicholas, and allow me to talk about what clause 1 is intended to achieve, which would usually be more appropriate to a stand part debate. However, I need to do that in order to explain the Government’s view of the amendments.
The Road Traffic Act 1988 made it possible for the Government, in promoting road safety, to make grants to bodies other than local authorities. I have no doubt that the Government at the time intended that Act to allow them to give money to bodies other than local authorities as well as giving money to the local authorities themselves. However, they succeeded only in making it impossible for Government to give money to local authorities for one-off schemes, which is perverse. The clause will allow us to give money either to local authorities or to other appropriate bodies to carry out demonstration projects—pieces of work that might teach us something about a road safety measure that we can then disseminate to all local authorities or more widely throughout the country.
We have various mechanisms for providing money to local authorities. The hon. Member for North Shropshire, who opened the debate, asked what happened to the existing funds that go to local authorities. We can make road safety funds available to local authorities through the local transport plan arrangements, but ring-fencing that money is difficult. Local authorities have a great degree of local autonomy at the moment and they can spend that money on virtually anything, as long as they are accountable to the local electorate. Clearly, if we want a particular local authority to do a piece of work for us as a demonstration or proof of concept, the last thing that we want is to hand over that money only to have the local authority decide that it is not going to do the project and that it will use the money for something else.
We want to be able to give specific local authorities one-off sums of money to do the sort of experiments that Opposition Members have highlighted. We might want a local authority to experiment with flashing warning signs or with 20-mph zones around schools, for example, and to feed back the information from that experiment so that we can disseminate the experience more widely.

Stephen Hammond: The Minister says that local authorities have a fair degree of autonomy at the moment, but to a large extent that is not true in London. The amendment would allow London boroughs to try a number of road safety schemes. In my borough, where I am still a councillor—for another eight weeks anyway—we have tried to get such schemes but were constrained by road safety funds and grants made available by Transport for London. The thrust of the amendment would be to allow local authorities and—perhaps more importantly and at an even more local level—ward councils to push for schools and parts of their area to get such funds, which are not available at the moment.

Stephen Ladyman: The hon. Gentleman makes a good point. I do not want to get into a discussion about local government in London, as I suspect that you would pull me up sharply if I were to do so, Sir Nicholas, but clearly if we agree to the clause as it stands, we would be able to give one-off grants to specific local authorities in London. We would want to do that in collaboration and co-operation with Transport for London—we do not want to go behind its back—but we would have the power to make the sort of grants to which the hon. Gentleman is referring.
I hope that I have answered the point that the hon. Member for North Shropshire raised and the concerns expressed to him about local authorities spending the money that they had coming to them for road safety generally in the hope that we would then provide them with additional money. That is certainly not the way in which we envisage the grant being used.
The right hon. Member for East Yorkshire talked about the carrot and stick approach, which the hon. Member for North Shropshire also mentioned. I agree with them that it is no good thinking that we can impose road safety on the world. We have to bring people with us and win over their hearts and minds. We have to make sure that they have all the information and all the training needed to be able to use the roads safely, and we need a lot of innovation if we are going to do that.
I believe that we in this country have the safest roads in the world. One of the downsides, from our point of view, is that we have already hit all the easy targets. Now, we have to be innovative to get further advances in safety. We have to have fresh ideas. Where the stick will come in is often clear—we can see how it might help us to improve road safety in certain areas. It is often much more difficult to identify where the carrot can work—where providing that extra information or training programme can work—and that is where I envisage the grants being used. We might, for example,  test ideas about training young people about road safety issues and driving before they are even old enough to be drivers; however, I would not want to pump money into a national scheme until I knew that it would work. The obvious people to do that work for us and to find out whether it works are local authorities. We want to have the power to make such grants without going through the cumbersome special grant procedure.
That is exactly how we see the programme working. We do not see it as an alternative to local transport plans, and we certainly do not see it as a way of removing local autonomy. As to reporting on the issues, I understand what the hon. Member for Orkney and Shetland (Mr. Carmichael) means about having a bin full of annual reports. I sometimes share his concern on that, but information on such programmes tends to be provided through the Department’s annual reports and other such mechanisms. More importantly—this relates to the point made by the right hon. Member for East Yorkshire—we publish the results of such experiments on our website.
Clearly, the whole point of conducting such an experiment is to learn from it and to find out what works and what does not. It would be self-defeating to carry out such demonstration projects without publishing the results widely. On certain occasions, it would be appropriate for a Minister to make a statement about the outcome of a particular experiment, especially if that outcome were so positive that we believed it presaged or would even lead us directly to a change in Government policy. It would be entirely appropriate for such results to be flagged up in a written ministerial statement. I can give the right hon. Gentleman the assurance that he seeks: wherever the grants were used, the Department would monitor carefully how they were used, study the outcome of the experiment and demonstration and ensure that the information was properly disseminated. On that basis, I hope that he will accept that another report will probably not be particularly helpful.
I have no doubt that we will discuss camera partnerships in more detail later in our proceedings, but I should remind hon. Members that when we announced the changes in our policy on camera partnerships a few months ago, we said that we envisaged them becoming much wider. Frankly, I do not want to see partnerships consisting only of the police, who have responsibility for enforcement and collecting fines, and the teams that put up the cameras. Such an approach breeds exactly the mentality of those who believe that the only answer to a problem is a camera, because the people in such a partnership will essentially be earning their living out of cameras. Of course they will see cameras as the solution, and they will see more cameras as a way of providing more income.
I want partnerships to be much more widely representative of the local community. They have worked most successfully with that approach; some of  the partnerships in the east of England are a good example. I want to see local authority road safety teams in there. I want people from the national health service and the fire service to be involved, as well as the police. Perhaps people from the voluntary sector should be there too. Clearly, if we are going to have these wide-ranging partnerships, accepting an amendment preventing us from giving grants to anyone who was a member of such partnerships would be perverse. I hope that we can dispose of that amendment.

Greg Knight: In the Minister’s vision of wider safety camera partnerships, does he envisage a role for the local road user?

Stephen Ladyman: It is entirely possible that representatives of local road users could be in the partnerships. They could include people from the business community who have fleets that use local roads, such as those in the haulage industry, or representatives of ordinary road users such as pedestrians and cyclists. Such people may well have a place in the partnerships. At some point we might want to use one of the small grants to encourage a local authority to devise a scheme to identify the appropriate people for a partnership. We could then disseminate more widely that authority’s experience of including people.
I hope that I have dealt with all the points that have been raised. If I have not, I am prepared to try again.

Owen Paterson: The idea of experimental money for new projects is interesting. Will the Minister assure us that it cannot cut into existing transport budgets? The obvious question that has not yet been asked is how much money we are talking about.

Stephen Ladyman: I can certainly assure the hon. Gentleman that we do not intend to take money from existing pots and put it into the new pot that will be at our disposal. We do not yet have a budget identified. We have used various budgets in the past to give money to a variety of organisations, including local authorities. Some of that has been disbursed through special grants and some through other mechanisms. He will be aware that the Government often have to be innovative in the way in which they make money available to projects, and we have granted money to local authorities and others through various ruses.
The sums involved tend to be relatively small. Bigger projects may sometimes receive £100,000 or £300,000. Schemes have ranged from those seeking to educate young people on road safety matters to those involving cyclists and other road users. We are not necessarily talking about massive projects, although there is scope for some big and innovative projects in the future. I am happy to write to the hon. Member for North Shropshire and other members of the Committee with examples of the schemes that we have helped in the past and would expect to fund through this mechanism. I hope that I have given sufficient reassurances to hon. Members to prevent them from pressing the amendment to a Division, and also that  they will support clause 1 stand part. I understand that the amendments were probing, and I hope that they have probed sufficiently.

Owen Paterson: That clarification has been helpful. I had not understood that the notion was that the funds would be experimental and for the purpose of carrying out practical trials. We have had an interesting debate, and I particularly liked the point made by my right hon. Friend the Member for East Yorkshire about education. I think that the Minister confirmed that funds could be disbursed for education as well as for the ideas that I put forward, such as flashing signs or speed limits around schools. I am encouraged by what he said and by his reassurance that a wide range of people will be on the partnerships. As we will discuss shortly, I think that the partnerships as they stand are flawed.

Stephen Ladyman: I give the hon. Gentleman the assurance that he seeks. An example of a project that has been funded is one in Stoke-on-Trent that involved Blurton dads’ club, which is run alongside Sure Start. There was also a grant of a little less than £1 million to an older pedestrians’ initiative and one of about £1 million to a project in Liverpool called “Our walk to school.” Those are neighbourhood road safety initiative projects that we have funded. The hon. Gentleman might also want to look at a scheme called Kerbcraft, which teaches young children practical roadside skills. I hope that those are the sorts of educational schemes to which he referred.

Owen Paterson: That was a most helpful intervention. I am glad that the Minister did not find those projects in his notes, because they are exactly the sort of projects that we would be seeking over and above the stuff about science and limits, and they would be a worthwhile addition to measures to improve road safety, as long as we had the assurance that they would not cut into existing budgets. On that basis, I am happy to seek to withdraw the amendment.

Amendment, by leave, withdrawn.

Question proposed, That the clause stand part of the Bill.

Greg Knight: I rise to ask the Minister a question and to place on record an expression of hope. First, the question relates to the scope of the grants. Could a road safety grant ever be given to remove a road completely? If someone has an idea that a road should be closed to traffic and turned over completely to pedestrians, could one of these grants ever be used for that purpose?
Secondly, I hope that if the Bill completes its passage and the system is up and running, the Department will not take a one-size-fits-all view of grants under the clause, because local needs and the environment of the area must also be taken into consideration.
Perhaps I may give the Minister an example in a related area. I am well aware that Departments generally try to encourage local authorities to consider ways of promoting public transport use and to discourage unnecessary car journeys. There is nothing  wrong with that. In cities such as Nottingham or maybe Derby, or in inner-city London, it makes sense to support the local authority if it wants to introduce a park-and-ride scheme. One way to encourage motorists to use park-and-ride schemes is to make them pay for inner-city parking, while the parking for the park-and-ride is free or very low-cost, so there is an incentive to use it.
My local authority, the East Riding of Yorkshire council, has recently been put under considerable pressure to introduce car-parking charges in Bridlington. In this case, which I give as an example, there has been no consideration of the needs of an English seaside town. We should encourage people to take holidays in the UK and to visit our seaside towns. I say to the Minister with the greatest respect that we will not encourage a young couple with children to go to the seaside, park their car and then, with little Johnny, their suitcases and their buckets and spades, use a park-and-ride scheme. My local authority has been put under pressure by the Department to abolish free parking in the town of Bridlington, and that is a mistake. It will affect the local economy, because a seaside town is different from an inner-city area in the middle of the country. I therefore hope that when we are considering grants under this provision, the Department will take into account local need, which it has not done in that example.

Stephen Ladyman: I do not know of the initiative to which the right hon. Gentleman refers, and I would be worried if my Department were applying pressure so specifically. He may want to drop me a line about the project and I shall certainly look into it.
We do not intend the clause to be used to allow any form of road engineering. Were we to do that with a one-off grant to a particular local authority, I have no doubt that all the other local authorities would plough in and say, “We want some, too.” That would then begin to bring into disrepute the local transport plan programme and all the other mechanisms that are in place to distribute road engineering funding fairly.
Having said that that is not what we intend, one might ask whether the clause could be used to remove a road or a piece of engineering work in the future. I will ask my lawyers to reflect on that, but my interpretation of the clause is such that if it could be argued that the measure in question was entirely a road safety measure and that that was the only rationale for it, the provision could legally be used for that purpose. I will write to the right hon. Gentleman and tell him whether the lawyers confirm that that is the case, but we certainly do not intend the clause to be used in that way.
Perhaps I may take the Committee back to where we started. Back in 1988, the then Government had what I thought was a very good idea: they wanted to encourage demonstration projects to be carried out by the most appropriate voluntary organisations or other expert groups, so they drew up a measure to enable them to provide those groups with money. Clearly, the groups would not be the sort that would carry out  engineering works on our roads; they would engage with local communities, teaching kids how to get to school more safely, helping cyclists and motorcyclists, and carrying out similar projects. However, the 1988 Government did not intend to prevent themselves and future Governments from giving money for the same purposes to local authorities.
We want the clause to enable us to use local authorities to carry out demonstration projects in the same way as the 1988 Government intended to use voluntary organisations and others. That is how we want to use the clause, although on first reading it might appear that, if they wanted to, the Government could use the money in the way that the right hon. Gentleman suggests. However, as I said, I shall write to him on the matter.

Owen Paterson: The debate has demonstrated the purpose of a Standing Committee, because we now have a much better understanding of the clause. Opposition Members like the idea of experimentation. We like the idea that the clause can be used to support small projects and that, if a project has worked in one part of the country, it might be advertised to other areas. The clause also allows variety and flexibility. On that basis we are content to support it.

Question put and agreed to.

Clause 1 ordered to stand part of the Bill.

Clause 2 - Application of surplus income from safety camera enforcement

Owen Paterson: I beg to move amendment No. 18, in clause 2, page 1, line 17, leave out ‘may’ and insert ‘shall’.

Nicholas Winterton: With this it will be convenient to discuss amendment No. 19, in clause 2, page 1, line 19, leave out from ‘(2)’ to ‘to’ in line 20.

Owen Paterson: We like the clause, but we think that it could be better. There are real doubts in the public’s mind about the present safety camera regime, and we want to toughen up the clause so that all surpluses have to go towards road safety.
The figures are quite striking. In 2000-01 there were only seven partnerships. They received £10.362 million and spent £8.985 million, leaving a balance of £1.367 million, which went into the Consolidated Fund, which, to be blunt, is the black hole presided over by the Chancellor. That balance was 13 per cent. of the funds in 2001. What is fascinating is that there has been a spectacular increase in income and in the number of partnerships—we are now up to about 35 partnerships. In 2003-04 there were receipts of £112.2 million and expenditure of £91.8 million, leaving an astonishing £20.4 million going to the Chancellor. Not only have receipts increased approximately tenfold, but the balance going to the Chancellor as a percentage  of total receipts has increased from 13 to 18 per cent. That means that a very substantial sum is not going towards road safety.
The issue has caused controversy in my own patch. In the autumn, the Minister kindly answered some parliamentary questions of mine. In West Mercia, £4.897 million was spent on speed camera running costs, but fixed penalty fines totalled £6.182 million, so more than £1.2 million from my area went to the Consolidated Fund. That is bitterly resented. The regime has to change. We have gone from about 200,000 speeding fines imposed about 10 years ago to about 2 million today, and very large amounts of the money raised are not being spent on safety. There are worse cases: six road safety partnerships have each made a profit of more than £1 million, with money going on to Whitehall. The biggest profit—£1.7 million—was made by the Northumbria safety camera partnership, with motorists in the county stumping up more than £4 million in fines.
The Secretary of State has announced that he will overhaul the programme and that the surpluses—about £110 million a year—will go to a new national road safety fund. That has to be done. There is an interesting quote from Edmund King, the executive director of the RAC Foundation:
“These figures show that there is a lot that can be spent on wider road safety improvements. Some cameras are money-making enterprises, some are not. I have seen a document from a road safety partnership warning that it was in danger of not breaking even and suggesting two options. One was to place cameras where they would catch more motorists and the other was to lower the speed threshold for prosecution.”
That is exactly what we should not be doing. That really is not the way to get the collaboration of the 34 million drivers whom I mentioned on Second Reading and touched on briefly in the debate on the programme motion. I believe strongly that we cannot coerce those drivers—we cannot just use a stick. The vast majority of drivers are hard-working, law-abiding people going about their daily lives and trying to get from A to B in safety and on time. Unfortunately, the way in which the safety camera regime has been set up has caused real alienation.
A case close to me, although not on my patch, has caused real controversy locally. I had a note from the Association of British Drivers about one of the earliest cameras. I have not had time to go into the details, but the association claims that a local council and a local camera partnership provided different detailed information on a camera at a location called Bennetts bank. The association says:
“When the information was analysed, it showed that not only did the camera partnership and the local council provide different data, but the partnership’s analyses of the figures were highly dubious and, quite clearly, there had been no accidents at the point where the camera was installed.”
The association claims that the camera was installed without the statutory number of accidents—at the time, four fatal accidents in a three-year period, I think—having occurred.
Last night, I received an e-mail from a Mr. John Evans, who wrote that Bennetts bank
“was an obvious place to trap drivers coming down from the M54 or coming from Wellington back up to Ketly Roundabout on a normally safe straight piece of road, spacious and walled on both sides except for some terraced houses at the top end.
An employee of the council seconded to the partnership agreed with me off record and admitted that the main reason for the placement was that it was a good place to catch the 7000 vehicles per day flow. It was necessary to kick start the abominable partnership in this way as this was the first such camera in Shropshire ... I assure you that I have no great interest in cars but hate it when both my intelligence and my pocket is abused. It is probable that tens of thousands of fines have been collected at this site alone. I know that countless people have been up in arms about this cynical ploy based on the narrowest interpretation of the law to meet the Exchequer’s requirements.”
We have to face the political reality that such opinions are out there and they are very damaging to the idea of collaboration. It is vital to implement speed limits that are respected and accord with drivers’ behaviour. In this case, there was a straight piece of road, where fatal accidents had not occurred. In fact, last night, a senior member of the Telford community told me that there were other places in Telford that really would have benefited from the installation of speed cameras.Vicky Cann, the assistant director of Transport 2000, said that
“the very high casualty criteria are a major obstacle to greater use of cameras along roads considered dangerous. It is unacceptable that where people have already died or been seriously injured in speed-related crashes further tragedies must occur before effective speed limit enforcement is undertaken”.
The current regime is being attacked from two angles. There is a strong belief that cameras are being placed unnecessarily, rather as the Bourbon tax farmers had free rein to raise taxes and to take a slice of the revenue themselves. To put it bluntly, the more a safety camera organisation can expand its operations, the more money it can raise and the more it can fund itself and pay its employees. That is quite wrong. We must get away from the concept that speed cameras are not helpful. We need to get back to the idea, promoted by Vicky Cann, that there are areas where a speed camera in the right place could reduce accidents.
I have referred several times to the example in Telford because it caused such bad feeling in the local area. A speed camera was installed on what is regarded a straight, safe road, where, according to those who have discussed the case with me, it is probably safe to travel at 40 mph. It is vital that we return to the idea that speed cameras are associated with road safety. They should be placed in areas where there are real dangers of very unpleasant and possibly fatal accidents. I received a very good letter from Roger Geffen, the campaigns and policy manager of the Cyclists’ Touring Club. He said that
“to kill off the criticism of safety cameras as “cash cows”, two principles must be followed:
1) The purposes of cameras must be transparently linked to road safety objectives and
2) That there is no risk that the Government might use camera revenue to replace other “mainstream” road safety funding, as delivered through the Local Transport Plan (LTP) process”.
Those principles are wholly admirable. We would begin to claw back some public confidence in speed cameras if people knew that all the money raised went toward road safety. That is black and white statement.  We should be able to tell all motorists and road safety campaigners that every bit of the surplus will be ploughed back into road safety. Such an approach might begin to win back some public confidence. The Minister might comment on that in his response.
As it stands, clause 2 states that some of the money may be spent on relevant
“local transport facilities or related environmental improvements, including road safety measures”.
Can the Minister elaborate on what the Government have in mind? I ask because the Committee received an interesting note from RBS Insurance, pointing out that
“One area ripe for action is the framework for inspecting the quality of road repair work undertaken. At present local authorities only have a duty/right to inspect 30% of road works to make sure that their companies are meeting appropriate standards, a level that is surely inefficient”.
On what objectives is the money to be targeted?
Clause 2 would be improved greatly if amendments Nos. 18 and 19 were agreed to. The word “may” is wishy-washy—it allows the Government to park the issue for a year or two. The word “shall” should be used. It should be clear that all surplus revenue raised from the installation of speed cameras must be spent on road safety schemes. I am very interested to hear the Minister’s comments on that suggestion.

Alistair Carmichael: I dread that I may one day have to tot up the amount of time I have spent in Committee debating whether the appropriate word to use is “may” or “shall”. I fear that if we did undertake that exercise, we would discover that we have contributed very little to the sum of human happiness. In fact, on this occasion, I beg to differ with the hon. Member for North Shropshire. By using the word “may”, the Government have got it right, because to compel the Government to make a regulation that changing circumstances may render unnecessary would merely lead to yet more unnecessary legislation.

Stephen Ladyman: Frankly, I do not care whether the word used is “may” or “shall”. I agree entirely that the clause is wishy-washy and badly drafted, but it was inserted in the Lords by Liberal Democrats and Tories.

Alistair Carmichael: I am sorry, but I may have given the impression that I cared about whether the word used was “may” or “shall”. If I did give that impression, I accept that it was entirely misleading and I apologise unreservedly to the Committee.
I have some concerns, however, about amendment No. 19. Removing the words
“over and above such income as is required to cover expenditure on the operation of a safety camera scheme”
would effectively enable any future Secretary of State to leave a camera partnership operating at a loss if he demanded a certain amount of money. I can see tensions arising there. The hon. Member for North Shropshire is right to highlight the amount of fines that will go to the Consolidated Fund, but his amendments,  which could mean that taxpayers, locally or nationally, ended up funding safety cameras directly, would not be helpful in any way.

Owen Paterson: Is the hon. Gentleman’s party happy that substantial sums are now going directly to the Treasury instead of being ploughed back into road safety schemes?

Alistair Carmichael: Of course I am not happy, although what the hon. Gentleman describes has for ever been the case, whether through fixed penalties or penalties imposed by the court. That is why he is right to highlight the fact that such an amount is going into the Consolidated Fund. Be they wishy-washy or otherwise, the provisions give us the opportunity to direct some of that money back towards local road safety improvements, which should be welcomed.

Stephen Hammond: The hon. Gentleman may not care whether it is “may” or “shall”, but my hon. Friend the Member for North Shropshire is right to differentiate the two. He made several important points in support of the amendment. First, being the learned gentleman that he is, the Minister will know about the Shakespearean theme of appearance and reality. He may be about to argue that the reality is that too many speed cameras are not revenue-generating machines for the Government, yet most people perceive that a huge number of them are merely just that. Cameras should be there to reduce the speed of vehicles to make them comply with the law or to reduce accidents. The whole point of having “shall” instead of “may” is to reinforce that.
My hon. Friend spoke about the amounts that go into some general pot that can never be seen. I am surprised that the Minister does not want to support the amendment. If he did, there would be money for the experimental schemes that he talked about when we discussed clause 1. It would be helpful not to siphon such moneys off into general or non-transport areas. That is entirely consistent with what was said earlier, so the amendment is entirely consistent with the thrust of what the Government are trying to do. Surplus moneys from speed camera fines should be used for road safety improvements.

Stephen Ladyman: The hon. Gentleman just called me learned. I hope that he was saying that I have learned something, rather than using the word in its formal sense and accusing me of being a lawyer. If he is accusing me of being a lawyer, I may have to black his eye for him.

Stephen Hammond: I apologise.

Stephen Ladyman: Frankly, I do not mind whether the amendments are agreed to. I shall leave it to the Government Whip to decide whether he allows them to be passed. He may wish to enhance the career of the hon. Member for North Shropshire by allowing him to be the first shadow Minister to move an Opposition  amendment that is agreed to, but I shall be seeking the support of my hon. Friends for removing the entire clause at stand part.
The clause is unnecessary. We considered these matters in December. The purpose of the clause is to make money raised through fine income from cameras available for purposes wider than the installation of cameras. In the current financial year, the rules are that camera partnerships that install cameras can keep the fines in order to pay their costs in maintaining the cameras and enforcement, after which only the surplus goes to the Treasury. We agree entirely that that gives the impression to drivers that cameras are self-proliferating and that people put them up in order to make money.
I say to the hon. Member for North Shropshire, who talked about a road in his constituency—

Owen Paterson: The road is not in my constituency.

Stephen Ladyman: I stand corrected. The hon. Gentleman referred to a road that was straight and safe to break the speed limit on. Anybody who does not wish to pay a fine can stick to the speed limit. If a speed limit is there, one must assume that it is there for a purpose. That is why the Secretary of State said in his announcement in December that, as well as breaking the link between fine income and cameras, we would also ask all local authorities over the next few years to review every speed limit in the country and to make sure that the limits were appropriate. I have said publicly that I expect some speed limits to go up, perhaps where engineering has improved the safety of a road over the years, so the lower speed limit is no longer appropriate.

Greg Knight: That is an important point. I understand that local authorities can currently impose speed limits irrespective of whether they are necessary. There is no means by which a member of the public who uses a road can challenge the local authority’s decision or make it give reasons. Under the process that the Minister outlined, are local authorities given guidelines as to what they should look for, which tell them that if a speed limit does not meet the criteria, they must seek to raise it? Are they put under a duty to do so?

Stephen Ladyman: We are certainly producing guidelines that we want local authorities to follow in assessing all speed limits. I have said publicly that I would expect them to start with the highest priority sites, which I would have thought they would identify through the accident rate, first and foremost. If there is a very high accident rate on a particular road, they must consider the possibility that the speed limit is set too high. Equally, if there is a low accident rate on a road, but a high rate of speeding, they might consider the possibility that the speed limit has been set too low. They should adjust the speed limit accordingly and, in doing so, win back the confidence of drivers.
What we must not do—this was implied in the tone of the hon. Member for North Shropshire, with which I take issue—is say to drivers that there are any circumstances in which it is okay to ignore the speed  limit. If somebody thinks that the speed limit is not right, they should make representations through their local council to have the limit changed. They should not think that they can make the judgment and simply ignore the speed limit.

Greg Knight: Has the guidance crystallised? In other words, is it in its final form, and if so, could members of the Committee please have a copy?

Stephen Ladyman: I do not know whether the guidance has been finalised yet. It is within a short period of being finalised. If it is ready for dissemination, I shall certainly let Committee members have a copy. If not, I shall write to advise when it will be available, and copies will be put in the Library and sent out to all local authorities.

Lee Scott: I have raised previously an issue concerning a speed camera at the bottom of the M11. The only thing proven by the evidence that has been supplied is that the camera has made accidents and road safety worse. In such instances, the word “shall” would at least tell the people who are fined for speeding that their fines will be properly used for road safety, rather than that the fines may perhaps be used in that way, although they may go to the Chancellor.

Stephen Ladyman: I do not know the particular scheme to which the hon. Gentleman referred; he may well have raised it or written to me about it, but it has slipped my memory. I can tell him, however, that wherever a speed camera is put up, the accident data and the reasons why it is there should be on the partnership website associated with that camera. Any member of the public who sees a camera that they suspect has been installed for money-raising purposes can go on to the internet and find out why it is there. It is the number of people who are killed or seriously injured, rather than just the number of fatalities, as the hon. Member for North Shropshire said, which governs where a camera should be located.
Until now, the rules have referred to whether a certain number of people have been killed or seriously injured over a period and whether there is evidence of speeding at the location. That is what a camera partnership should look for before a camera is installed. If cameras are installed other than in such locations, members of the public should talk to their local council and to the partnership about exactly why that has happened.
The right hon. Member for East Yorkshire said that members of the public could not challenge a speed limit that they feel is inappropriate for a particular road. Of course they can challenge it; indeed, we are just coming up to local elections, which is exactly when they should do so. When councillors or potential councillors knock on people’s front doors in local elections, if people occasionally raised such local issues and said that the candidates would be judged on them, I suspect that there would be a good deal more focus than at present on some of the things that irritate people. There is no specific right of appeal, however,  and speed limits are not subject to planning applications in the way that the hon. Member for North Shropshire might hope for.
We need to make camera partnerships more responsive, but I should first say that cameras work. We have now completed three studies during the four years for which camera partnerships have existed, looking at accident rates before and after camera deployment. There was some controversy last year about whether the so-called regression to mean effect might be distorting the data, but in the fourth study, we have examined not only whether the accident rate at camera sites has been reduced, but the impact of regression to mean on the figures. There is absolutely no doubt whatever that cameras save lives. They reduce people’s speed, and they reduce the number of people killed or seriously injured at camera sites.
As I have said on several occasions, however, we must strike a deal with the motorist whereby we make it clear to them that we are putting up cameras not merely to raise money, as some motorists perceive, but where there is no better way of making a site safe and when we have looked at the accident and speed record, along with alternatives such as engineering work, flashing signs and other information that might be made available to help slow motorists down. When there is no better solution for a serious blackspot than a camera, a camera goes in.
If we can convince motorists that that is what we are trying to achieve, I hope that they will respond. Their part of the deal will be to respect speed limits more than they do at the moment. We should start telling people who speed that their speed is not acceptable, in the same way as in the 1960s and 1970s, when people changed their attitude to drink-driving dramatically. Characters in television situation comedies used to get drunk and drive their cars and everyone laughed at them, but no one would laugh these days. By striking a deal with the motorist, we have to get the public to change their attitude to speeding, so that they start to respect speed limits and we will not have to fine them.
We have completely changed the rules that govern the camera partnerships so that there is no link between the fines they raise and the money they get. From 2007-08, all the money from fines will go to the Treasury. In return, the Treasury will give back £110 million—the amount currently being collected through fines—which will be used by local partnerships and authorities for road safety measures, which may include the installation and maintenance of cameras. The decision on the most appropriate way of using the money will be made locally. There will no longer be an incentive for people in camera partnerships to put up cameras because it will guarantee them an income. There will be no link between the fines raised by the local authority camera partnership and the amount that they receive. Where there will be a link is in how well they are doing on road safety issues. The local authorities that are successful in tackling road safety will benefit most.
I have described the mechanism that will operate in future. We do not need legislation to change it, because we have done it already. The Secretary of State made a statement in December about how the road safety partnership system was being changed. That makes clause 2 redundant and I hope that the Committee will vote against its standing part of the Bill. I am completely neutral on the amendments, although we might agree to them so that, for a few brief seconds, the hon. Member for North Shropshire can say that he has won something in Committee.
During the debate I have been reflecting on what the right hon. Member for East Yorkshire said. I can tell him that traffic authorities have to publish traffic regulation orders when they propose changes to speed limits. The public can object and their objections must duly be considered before the order is made. There is therefore a mechanism other than the local elections for people to object to speed limits.
Having said all that, I hope that the hon. Member for North Shropshire will again make the case for the amendments and that my hon. Friends will then remove the clause from the Bill.

Owen Paterson: The Minister’s reply was a bit of a curate’s egg. We are delighted that he is happy to support our amendments, but if what he says is in line with Government policy, I am not sure why he will not support clause stand part. He appears to have said that there is an absolute guarantee that all surpluses raised by speed camera partnerships will go to the Treasury and then on to road safety measures. I wonder if that is a correct statement, because our amendments have the same purpose: we want all the surpluses—income in excess of expenditure—to go into road safety measures. That is a simple request, but an important part of the battle to regain motorists’ confidence.
The Committee’s views on speed cameras are not miles apart, but there has been a loss of public confidence. If we were able to say that all the fines would go into road safety it would have a major impact on people’s confidence. I am pleased that the Minister said he would support amendments Nos. 18 and 19.

Amendment agreed to.

Amendment made: No. 19, in clause 2, page 1, line 19, leave out from ‘(2)’ to ‘to’ in line 20.—[Mr. Paterson.]

Question proposed, That the clause, as amended, stand part of the Bill.

Greg Knight: I think that we are shortly to find out what the words “hollow victory” really mean.
The whole Committee is grateful to the Minister for the way in which he responded to the amendments. I applaud what I perceive to be a change of tone from the Government and their recognition, which I have not heard before, that one needs to consider the law-abiding motorist. That is basic common sense, because if speed limits are respected those who flout them will  become just as ostracised as those who drink and drive are now. As the Minister indicated, that was not always so. When the drink-driving legislation was first introduced, in it was a field day for comedians, particularly because of the bag that one had to blow into in those days. I welcome the Minister’s change of tone, but I am not yet convinced that the Government have got the balance right. I hope that we will see the guidance that is to go out to local authorities before the Committee debate proceeds much further.
The Minister said that a speed limit notice can be challenged as inappropriate, but in reality they are not challenged because most motorists are not aware of them. Most motorists live in one local authority area and commute to another to work. If the speed limit is altered on the part of their journey that is in the local authority area where they work, they probably do not buy the local paper. Even if they do, they will have to look very hard in the public notices column, and if they miss the paper on the day when it is published, they will not know that it is happening until it is too late.
The idea that the imposition of a speed limit could be reversed during local elections was the weakest part of the Minister’s speech. Very often, if there is a tragedy in a village—for example, a young child is killed on the road—politicians of all parties unite to mirror the grief in that village. If the relatives of the child hold the rather blinkered view that a lower speed limit is the answer, there tends to be local momentum behind the view that that would solve the problem and prevent another young child being killed, so a campaign for a lower speed limit is launched. It needs somebody very brave in those circumstances, particularly if he is seeking election, to say to the parents of a deceased child, “A lower speed limit is not the answer. A barrier on the pavement is the answer, and perhaps more education in the local school or with parents to make sure that children are not running loose on the pavement.” In those circumstances, emotion tends to rule the roost and a campaign goes forward with all-party support. I will applaud what the Department is doing if, as the Minister has indicated, the guidance tells local authorities that there may be cases in which they need to raise the speed limit. By so doing, a local authority will have more credibility and public support when it seeks to introduced a lower speed limit.
I welcome the overall tone of the Minister’s remarks, which I hope will live on longer than the clause, as amended, will do.

Stephen Ladyman: I welcome the right hon. Gentleman’s comments. We will make the guidance available to the Committee as soon as it is written.
I entirely agree with the right hon. Gentleman that people do not know about traffic regulation orders. I am the Minister of State and I did not know about them until a note was passed to me in the middle of that discussion, so how on earth can ordinary members of the public know that they can challenge speed limits in that way?
My point was that it is open to political parties to make a commitment in their manifesto for the forthcoming elections to review speed limits in their  area and decide whether they are right or wrong. I am pleased to say that in some parts of the country some parties’ manifestos say that they will review the speed limits around schools and use the powers that the Government have given them to introduce 20 mph zones. That is absolutely correct—every local authority in the country should examine the speed limit around every school and decide whether it is appropriate to have a 20 mph zone. It is a small leap from there for local authorities to say, “And while we’re at it, we will get on with the job of reviewing all the speed limits in our area, because we believe that some of them may no longer be appropriate. We shall join the Government in this battle to win over the hearts and minds of motorists.” They should commit to making sure that cameras are in the right places, that engineering is used where it is needed and that better signage and information is used where that is more appropriate. However, they will then make it clear to motorists that, having done their part of the deal, they will be tough with them: where there is a clear danger spot, the authorities will expect limits to be properly enforced. They will expect motorists to obey the law and not come whingeing that they have three points on their licence and that it will cost them £30 if they break the speed limit.
That is what we want to achieve. We have already changed the rules of the partnerships to achieve that. The Government have all the flexibility that they need to do that under existing legislation. That is why the clause is unnecessary. To be fair to their Lordships, when they inserted the clause in the Bill, they did not realise that the Government were on the verge of changing the rules without the Bill. I imagine that they would not have inserted the clause had they known that.
The clause is unnecessary. I hope that my assurances about the Government’s intentions in relation to road cameras and speed limits are sufficient to reassure hon. Members on both sides of the Committee and that Opposition Members will now allow the clause to be removed from the Bill, having had a short but, I hope, happy period in their lives when they thought they had won something.

Alistair Carmichael: The Minister says that the clause is unnecessary. As long as he remains in his post, that will undoubtedly be the case. I have no hesitation in saying that he is a man of good faith. However, I must gently point out to him that the day may come when he is not in that job. The day may even come when the Labour party is not in government.
I know that there is much talk in Labour circles about legacies. I suggest that the clause could be the Minister’s legacy to future generations, so that if the day came when the Government were not minded to act in the exemplary and fair manner that he outlined, which seems to have won such approval from all parts of the Committee, there would be something in law, albeit secondary legislation, that would prevent that change from taking place. That is why the clause is necessary and why it should stand part of the Bill.

Owen Paterson: Flushed with our victory on amendments Nos. 18 and 19, which we think significantly improve clause 2, I was very interested in the Minister’s comments. Like the hon. Member for Orkney and Shetland, I am pleased to see the way in which the Government have come round on this subject.
There are two extreme views on speed: there are those who think that cars will only be rendered safe if a man walks in front with a red flag, and there are others who think that the only really safe measure is to put a large spike, six inches long, in every steering wheel and to rely on the driver’s sense of self-preservation not to put his own life at risk while driving at any speed he wants. There has to be a happy compromise between the two. The Minister used absolutely the right word—“appropriate”—in his speech. That is the key. Speed as such does not kill. It is inappropriate speed that kills.
I have had a ton of correspondence on speed limits sent to me. One of the most extraordinary facts I learned was that when the speed limit in Park lane was 30 mph, the average speed was 41 mph. When the speed limit was increased to 40 mph, the average speed dropped to 39 mph. That struck me as a very good example of an inappropriate limit: people were driving with the imaginary spike pointing at their chests—driving with a sense of self-preservation. Against that, we have the case on which there seemed to be unanimity this morning—the question of having more flexibility on speed, particularly around schools. Interestingly, there seemed to be all-party support for that. I am therefore pleased that the Minister referred to “inappropriate speed” and not just “speed”. One cannot simply say that speed kills. It is inappropriate speed that kills.
My right hon. Friend the Member for East Yorkshire might like to hear that on Sunday I spoke to a Yorkshireman who had been taking his son to a driving lesson through a windy little village in Yorkshire. The son was going about 28 mph in a 30-mph area, and the father really went for him, saying, “What are you doing? Look what’s happening. There are tourists around, people crossing the road. There are families and buggies. This isn’t sensible. Forget the sign. You should be driving appropriately, according to the circumstances”. I have been encouraged and pleased by the way the Minister has been talking this morning, although I am disappointed that, having happily supported the amendments and allowed clause 2 to be improved enormously, he seems unlikely to let it stand part of the Bill.
I agree with the hon. Member for Orkney and Shetland. We may trust the Minister—he has been talking a lot of sense this morning and we agree with him. However, he will move on, perhaps to greater things, so it would be nice to have this legacy firmly on the statute book as a memorial to his firm belief that all surpluses should go to road safety. I hope that he will reconsider in the next few minutes and that clause 2, as amended, will stand part of the Bill.

Stephen Ladyman: There is common ground. We all want to establish motorists’ confidence that speed limits are appropriate and should therefore be respected. I would like Opposition Members to remember that recent opinion polls have shown that as many as 85 per cent. of motorists regard speeding as acceptable in certain circumstances. It is not. That is the battle that we are fighting. However, we have to fight it with both the carrot and the stick, as has been said. I think that the Government have got it right. The policy that we have proposed is the right one. We do not need new legislation, which is why the clause should be removed from the statute book.
Legacies have been mentioned. I can tell Opposition Members that the smiles on their faces when they won their amendment was sufficient legacy for me. However, one can have too much of a good thing, so I invite my hon. Friends to remove the clause from the Bill.

Question put, That the clause, as amended, stand part of the Bill.

The Committee divided: Ayes 6, Noes 9.

NOES

Question accordingly negatived.

Clause 2, as amended, disagreed to.

Nicholas Winterton: That was my first experience of that situation arising in a Standing Committee. Perhaps we have set a precedent.

Clause 3 - Graduated fixed penalties

Owen Paterson: I beg to move amendment No. 20, in clause 3, page 2, line 16, at end insert—
‘()the time of day it was committed,’.

Nicholas Winterton: With this it will be convenient to discuss the following amendments: No. 21, in clause 3, page 2, line 16, at end insert—
‘()the number of pedestrians and other vulnerable road users in the vicinity at the time,’.
No. 22, in clause 3, page 2, line 16, at end insert—
‘()the prevailing weather conditions,’.
No. 23, in clause 3, page 2, line 16, at end insert—
‘()the conditions of visibility,’.
No. 24, in clause 3, page 2, line 16, at end insert—
‘()any mitigating circumstances put forward by the offender.’.
No. 26, in clause 4, page 3, line 7, at end insert—
‘()the time of day it was committed,’.
No. 27, in clause 4, page 3, line 7, at end insert—
‘()the number of pedestrians and other vulnerable road users in the vicinity at the time,’.
No. 28, in clause 4, page 3, line 7, at end insert—
‘()the prevailing weather conditions,’.
No. 29, in clause 4, page 3, line 7, at end insert—
‘()the conditions of visibility,’.
No. 30, in clause 4, page 3, line 7, at end insert—
‘()any mitigating circumstances put forward by the offender.’.

Owen Paterson: Following our bitter disappointment that the amendments to clause 2 did not quite make it, we move on to clause 3. Again, the Opposition approve generally of what the Government are trying to do. I think that it was my right hon. Friend the Member for East Yorkshire who spoke on Second Reading about flexibility. We think that it is sensible to vary fixed penalties according to certain conditions, as proposed by the clause.
My party believes that there is a small number of what my right hon. Friend called, I think, bad hats—a hard core on which we should help the Government to bear down. The trick is not to go overboard on the vast majority of drivers who are hard-working, conscientious people, trying to get from A to B. While looking at some of the press reports, I found one of a completely ridiculous case in Fife, where a 38-year-old was found doing 85 mph in a 30 mph zone, causing the deaths of two people. In another case, in Lewisham, an uninsured 16-year-old drove an illegal car and killed two people.

Alistair Carmichael: I think that I heard the hon. Gentleman quote the case from Fife of a driver doing 85 mph where there was a 30 mph limit, and that that caused the deaths of two people. That is well outwith the range of anything dealt with by a fixed penalty offence; it is an indictment offence for causing death by dangerous driving.

Owen Paterson: That was helpful information, and I think that I know where the hon. Gentleman is coming from. My point, which we shall discuss at length when we deal with dangerous driving and causing death by dangerous driving, is that when one reads the press reports one sees that there is an extraordinary distance between a small number of people causing real damage and behaving extraordinarily badly, stupidly and dangerously, and, at the other extreme, the large numbers of people who are trying to go about their daily lives. The trick is to frame the legislation to encompass the two.
We are keen to help the Government bear down on the hard core—the small number of people who simply must be removed from the roads and punished extremely heavily. Driving at 85 mph in a 30 mph limit is absolutely ludicrous—I am sure that all members of the Committee endorse that view. The trick is somehow to come up with a framework of law that does not alienate the 34 million drivers. On that basis, we support the clause.
I have touched only upon speed. I am aware that the clause covers other motoring offences, but speed is the one that really catches the public imagination. As I said, there is a danger of losing the support and collaboration of many motorists. On that basis, the amendments propose a number of factors that should have an influence on penalties for those who have contravened a speed limit. I think that the time of day, as mentioned in amendment No. 20, is fundamental. There is a big difference between going at 32 mph, 33 mph or some speed just over the limit at 6 o’clock on a June morning in broad daylight when one is fresh and wide awake, and driving at the same speed at a busy time in the evening on a November evening when it is pouring with rain, one has driven 200 miles down from Manchester, and there are people coming out of schools. That point touches on the comment that I made about my friend in Yorkshire who taught a lesson to his son. The time of day should be taken into account.
As amendment No. 21 suggests, there is big difference between going out early on a clear summer’s morning when there is no one around and going out when people are coming home from work or leaving schools. That should have a bearing and a sensible driver should take into account the number of pedestrians who are around. We know that the majority of pedestrian accidents happen in towns.
Moving on to amendment No. 22, the weather must also be taken into account. It would be sensible to state in the Bill that weather conditions play a huge part in accidents. We have seen the highly publicised press reports of accidents happening in bad weather, when a sensible driver would have taken account of the prevailing conditions. That relates also to amendment No. 23, which mentions visibility. There are still cases of people driving at inappropriate speeds in the fog. Visibility is a measurable fact and it would be sensible to take it into account. Amendment No. 24 makes the blanket addition of any other mitigating circumstances.
We support the graduated fixed penalties, because they will give the Government and the authorities a chance to show flexibility and acknowledge that in a speeding case it is the appropriate speed that counts, not the absolute speed. Our amendments would improve clause 3, and I will be interested to hear the Minister’s comments on them. On the whole, we are in favour of the clause.

Greg Knight: I support the aim of my hon. Friend’s amendments. My only doubt is whether they are necessary. The Government’s own list is not exclusive. Proposed paragraphs (a),(b) and (c) in subsection (2) list as considerations
“the nature of the contravention ... how serious it is”
and
“the area, or sort of place, where it takes place”.
One could argue that that would include the time of day when an offence was committed. That is covered by the words “how serious it is”. If it was committed on a sunny day, I think that most people would say that it was less serious than if it had been committed on a foggy evening. One could argue that the number of  pedestrians also has a bearing on “how serious it is”, and the same is true of the prevailing weather conditions and the visibility.
It will be interesting to hear what the Minister says. I applaud my hon. Friend’s amendments, and I am with him on his aims but as a lawyer I am not convinced that we need to tack on to the Bill every imaginable set of circumstances, because the existing description pretty much covers all the eventualities that my hon. Friend wants us to consider.

Stephen Hammond: Although the Government have set down several criteria, we received a number of representations from the road transport lobby and others about the way in which we define “serious” and whether that is sufficiently precise. The thrust of the amendments in my name and that of my hon. Friend the Member for North Shropshire is to ensure greater precision in the wording of the clause.

Greg Knight: If the Minister does not convince the Committee, I will be with my hon. Friend on any vote he may wish to press for, although I suspect that the Minister may take the view, which I take, that the amendments are superfluous. I hope that he will be able to answer in detail shortly.
I have a different point that I would like the Minister to answer. Are the graduated fixed penalties in this clause and the graduated fixed penalty points in clause 4, which relate to the Road Traffic Offenders Act 1988, in respect of fixed penalty notices, howsoever issued, or do they relate only to fixed penalty notices issued by a police officer? I have concerns if they cover all fixed penalty notices. We all know that police officers are trained in the rules of evidence and that, by and large, unless one is dealing with a rogue officer, a police officer has a sense of justice. If he feels that a case is marginal and the driver is contrite, the officer may not even bother to write out a ticket and may wave the driver on, telling him to be more careful in future. A civilian person, however, might have been told by his line manager that the more tickets he gives out, the more likely he is to get a bonus at the end of the year or to ingratiate himself with those who employ him. I would have reservations about that and would take the view that we should perhaps put in extra safeguards. Therefore, I look forward to hearing the Minister explain whether the offences are in respect of tickets issued by police officers or go wider.

Alistair Carmichael: I do not think that anyone would take issue with the comments of the hon. Member for North Shropshire about cracking down on the hard core. However, if what a person does is so severe as to be worthy of the description of hard core, they should never be the subject of fixed penalty notices. I accept that I am perhaps a little old-fashioned in this respect, but I think that this is what the courts are there for. I speak as one who made his living as a criminal court solicitor, first as a prosecutor as a procurator fiscal depute and latterly as a defence agent, before entering Parliament. Indeed, examples such as the one from Fife that the hon. Member for North Shropshire cited  must be placed before the court. That applies equally to the other examples that he cited, as it would to that of the Yorkshireman whose learner-driver son drove at 28 mph in a way that could at the very least be described under the terms of section 3 of the Road Traffic Act 1988 as careless or inconsiderate.
My concern—I put it no more strongly than that—about graduated penalties is that their success or otherwise will be determined according to where the threshold is set. The danger is that by giving those who would otherwise go to court a fixed penalty, one downgrades the seriousness of the matter and risks losing some of the public disapprobation associated with going to court, not to mention the no small measure of inconvenience and expense associated with attending, which will act as a disincentive to the hard-core offender. That is why the definition of what constitutes hard core is crucial to the success or failure of the operation of the process.
I have seen the following happen as a result of actions taken by Governments of every colour during the years I have worked in the criminal justice system, and since I left it. There is a move to take people into courts, especially for what are considered to be minor road traffic offences. As the Minister said, speeding is not a minor road traffic offence; it is a particular species of antisocial behaviour and a very dangerous one at that. The move to pull people out of the criminal court system runs contrary to the Minister’s stated aim of improving our attitude towards speeding as a particularly antisocial offence.
Regarding the operation of clause 3, I go along with the view of the right hon. Member for East Yorkshire. The amendments are well intentioned and have been proposed to probe the Government’s thinking. In fact, much of the language used in the amendments could well have been borrowed from the explanatory notes. However, to be as exclusive as the amendments appear to be may not be helpful.
I would like to probe the Government’s thinking on proposed new subsection (2)(d), where it says:
“whether the offender appears to have committed any offence or offences of a description specified in the order during a period so specified.”
I would be grateful if the Minister would confirm my understanding of that. I presume that if someone were speeding at a certain level that was unexceptional in itself—albeit over the limit—in a car with a number of defects which would bring it into contravention of the construction and use regulations, it is envisaged that a greater penalty could be imposed. Is that the meaning of proposed new paragraph (d), or is there some other meaning behind it? If the Minister could clarify the way in which that paragraph will operate, I would be immensely grateful.

Stephen Ladyman: I entirely agree with the hon. Member for North Shropshire: we have to get really tough with the hard core. Bad offenders really need to feel the fingers on their collar. I agree also with the hon. Member for Orkney and Shetland that when people commit disproportionate speeding offences, there  should be no hesitation about taking them to court and prosecuting them for the most serious offence available.

Alistair Carmichael: We have heard many negative comments about the operation of speed cameras, but does the Minister accept that when a motorist does 85 mph in a 30 mph limit, as in the case outlined by the hon. Member for North Shropshire, the use of the camera would be essential and would be of enormous benefit to the prosecution? It would almost establish almost a cast-iron case of dangerous driving, and all that would remain for the prosecution to prove would be a causal link between the driver and the death.

Stephen Ladyman: I agree absolutely. The hon. Gentleman was entirely right when he said that someone who drives in excess of 80 mph in a 30 mph zone is clearly guilty of dangerous driving and not just of a minor speed infringement. If somebody has died as a result of that, the courts must impose serious penalties, and the camera would be vital in providing evidence to that effect.
With graduated penalties, we have a continuum available to us. At one end of the scale, there are people committing offences and breaching, for example, speed limits so seriously that they are guilty of dangerous driving. At the other end, there are people breaching the speed limit, which is a serious offence, but it would not proportionate to treat them in the same way. In between, there are grades of severity. It is clear that there are differences between those in a 30 mph zone who drive at 32 mph, and those who drive at 37 mph, 49 mph and 85 mph. We must have the flexibility to deal with those drivers differently.
The hon. Member for Orkney and Shetland is in favour of people having their day in court. Of course, people always have that opportunity. If they think that a fixed penalty has been imposed unfairly, they are entitled to say that they want their day in court and to argue either that they are innocent or that there were mitigating circumstances. I think that the hon. Member for North Shropshire slightly misunderstood matters when he suggested that mitigating factors should be included in the legislation. If an individual believes that there are mitigating circumstances that should be taken into account, it is for that person to make that argument in court. I have heard the stories about people racing to hospital and, therefore, believing that they had a rational reason for not obeying speed limits. If that is the case, by all means, they should have their day in court, make their case and see whether the magistrate agrees with them. That will be for the individual to decide.
By giving the police the flexibility to treat different offences differently, we are creating this deal that I talked about earlier—making the punishment fit the crime. We are also helping the police to be maximally efficient, because if somebody does have their day in court, or if the police decide to take someone to court rather than issue a fixed penalty notice, a police officer will have to be in court and cannot be on the streets  enforcing the law. There is an efficiency argument for the disposal of a significant number of offences through the fixed penalty system, if we can do so.

Alistair Carmichael: I must reinforce the point that a police officer who attends court to give evidence is enforcing the law. That is a very important part of his duty. Often, under the graduated system, it will be in the interests of the culpable motorist rather than of the public that he should accept the fixed penalty, because we have seen people at the upper end of the graduated scale dealt with in court, rather than in the privacy of their own front room with their cheque book.

Stephen Ladyman: I understand the hon. Gentleman’s point, but he forgets that offering a fixed penalty is at the discretion of the police. If they think that a higher penalty might be available to them if they take an individual to court, they will decide whether they should pursue that course of action to obtain the higher penalty. I do not envisage a system in which somebody who has committed a serious breach can sit at home, realising that if they accept the penalty notice they will automatically do better than if they take the matter to court. They may well do better if they take it to court, but the process will not be automatic and the police must have the discretion to decide whom they take to court and to whom they issue the fixed penalty notice.

Greg Knight: I wanted just to inquire whether the circumstances on which the Minister bases his reply, namely the issuing of the ticket by the police, are the answer to my question. Will the provision relate only to tickets issued by police officers?

Stephen Ladyman: No, those circumstances are not the answer to the question, and no, the provision will automatically apply not only to police officers. We are talking about speeding offences. That is where most of the publicity and consultation has been. It would be possible under the terms of the legislation for us to bring forward orders in which other offences—for example, breaches of the working time directive for heavy goods vehicle drivers, and other breaches—might be brought within the regime. They might be enforced not only by police officers, but by employees of the Vehicle and Operator Services Agency, for example. The order would be needed to specify the levels of training and expertise necessary for somebody to issue those tickets. It is not as if we are talking about decriminalising those offences, hiring just anybody to issue tickets and civilianising the offences; the provisions would have to be set out.
Talking about orders, I hope that this argument will convince the hon. Member for North Shropshire. The right hon. Member for East Yorkshire put his finger on it when he said that I would argue that there is sufficient detail in the Bill for our purposes. That is my view. To create an offence under the provisions before us, we would have to bring forward an order and carry out consultation. In the order, we would define exactly what we meant by “serious” and set out the offences that would be liable for graduated penalties.
The information in clauses 3 and 4 is sufficient detail. I cannot see any merit in putting in greater detail and tying this Government’s or future Governments’ hands any more tightly.

Tom Harris: Following on from the comments of the hon. Member for Orkney and Shetland, I note that the consequence of the measure will be to remove some offences from the court system and deal with them through fixed penalties. Will my hon. Friend clarify whether there is a corollary? Currently, someone travelling at 32 mph in a 30 mph zone will—practically speaking—almost never be prosecuted. With a graduation of penalty points, might someone in that position face one or two penalty points for a small offence, 2 or 3 mph above the official limit?

Stephen Ladyman: I am grateful to my hon. Friend for that intervention. As he correctly points out, someone doing 32 mph in a 30 mph zone would almost never be prosecuted. According to the Association of Chief Police Officers guidelines, the figure is 35 mph in a 30 mph area. The first reason for that is that ACPO recognises that speed can drift up and down by 1 or 2 mph, even when one is diligently trying to stick to the limit. Secondly, there are inaccuracies in speedometers and in the equipment that measures people’s speed. For fairness and to be proportionate, ACPO does not recommend prosecution at 35 mph. I would not envisage that that is likely to change any time soon.
I would, however, add this caveat. It is not impossible that at some point in the future the decision might be taken that speedometers are so good and speed detection equipment so accurate that the ACPO guidelines need to change and we might want to say that we can enforce fairly at 33 mph in a 30 mph zone. I simply put that as a possibility because I want to be honest with my hon. Friend. But we have no intention of changing the ACPO guidance at present.

Alistair Carmichael: Will the Minister give way?

Stephen Ladyman: Before I let the hon. Gentleman intervene again, could I give him an answer to his question about proposed paragraph (d)? Its main purpose was to build in repeat offending and cases where people might accumulate offences if we decide to include things like the working time directive and breaches of drivers’ hours regulations within this structure.

Alistair Carmichael: This has been an interesting and helpful debate. The Minister’s attitude has been central to that. It appears however that the effective operation of graduated penalties will depend on the decision of the police officer, certainly regarding the number of penalty points and the amount of fine that is to be imposed. What discussion has the Minister had with ACPO or any of the other police bodies to ensure that the officers who make what is no longer a straightforward decision, but one that brings with it a degree of discretion and no small measure of legal complexity, will be given the proper level of training and will be of appropriate seniority?

Stephen Ladyman: I envisage the issuing of fixed penalties as ultimately being a straightforward decision-making process. We published an earlier consultation on how this would work, which included the ACPO guidance and our first pass ideas of where people would be eligible for two points, a three points standard fine or six points. I will be talking about those issues on later clauses. If these enabling powers are passed we intend to publish an order that sets out our views on how these things would be done. There would be a full consultation and doubtless a debate in the House before such an order is made.
The break points for the issuing of fixed penalty notices will be a relatively routine process. The hon. Gentleman is right to say that a senior officer must be involved when a decision has to be taken on whether someone has now breached the law in such a way that they ought to be taken to court and a more serious offence pursued. I will be talking to ACPO about how it intends to address that issue. I can understand what the hon. Gentleman was trying to get at with these amendments but I do not believe that they are necessary. There is sufficient detail in the Bill already and there are sufficient safeguards in the orders that we will have to publish before we enact the legislation.

Owen Paterson: I should like to clarify the points that I was trying to make to the hon. Member for Orkney and Shetland.
I described some extreme cases to show what we are facing and we will come to “careless and dangerous.” We have tabled carefully thought-through amendments on that, because there is a clear problem with the complete idiot who goes at 85 mph. I quoted that little story of my friend from Yorkshire to show that the question is one of appropriate speed. There might be times of day when going at 30 mph through that twisty Yorkshire village is absolutely safe, because there is no one around. There might be times of day when one could go up to the ACPO level of 10 per cent. plus two—35 mph—when there is no one around and it is dry. That might be sensible. The point that my friend was making to his learner son was that on quite a busy Sunday afternoon that was not sensible. The son could not be done for careless driving or anything, but he was trying to teach him that the sign, with the disc and number, is not the last word. It is an indication. The key is appropriate speed.

Alistair Carmichael: The hon. Gentleman is right. Dealing with the idiots is straightforward, the ones at the extreme end as simply as with those who are at the lower end, at 35 or 36 mph. That is not difficult. The difficulty comes on the margin. The challenge presented by graduated penalties is that there will be  much more discretion in deciding what is appropriate given to police officers. That will only work if they are sufficiently senior and trained.

Owen Paterson: The hon. Gentleman makes a sensible point. The problem is the subjective judgment about conditions. I am pleased that we are now talking about this. That is part of the problem; adhering to the number inside the red disc is too brutal and too simplistic. He is right that there will have to be subjective judgments made by officers on the ground, but that is why I like what is being proposed in clause 3. We put the obviously probing amendments down, deliberately listing the conditions. The Minister made a good case for them probably being unnecessary, as was pointed out by my right hon. Friend the Member for East Yorkshire. The amendment is quite obviously probing. The trick is to get across about appropriate speed, which depends on conditions.
I did not mention a couple of studies. One, from British Columbia, where a big survey on speed limits was carried out, was particularly interesting. It said, bluntly, that posted limits that were set higher or lower and dictated by roadway and traffic conditions were ignored by the majority of motorists.
That was confirmed by another report, from the Arizona department of transportation, which talked about the 85th percentile, which is the speed up to which 85 per cent. of drivers are driving. Interestingly, they have established that the safest speed is at the 85th percentile speed. Those who were driving well below are dangerous and, obviously, the idiots who are driving well above are dangerous. The trick is to try to get the speed limits somewhere in line with the 85th percentile. That is extremely hard with fixed signs, therefore the clause, in attempting to get flexibility for the authorities to adjust their actions according to the conditions prevailing at the time, is very sensible.
We were obviously probing with our amendments, but on the basis of what the Minister said I beg to ask leave to withdraw the amendment.

Amendment, by leave, withdrawn.

Question proposed, That the clause stand part of the Bill.

Greg Knight: I had not intended to speak, but a couple of things came out of the Minister’s reply to the earlier debate that I would like to tease out of him. He indicated that the Government’s game plan is to widen the number of people who are able to issue the fixed penalty tickets from the police officer to employees of the Department who are qualified vehicle examiners.

It being One o’clock, The Chairman adjourned the Committee without Question put, pursuant to the Standing Order.

Adjourned till this day at half-past Four o’clock.